Sunday, May 21, 2006

Jürgen Graf is a Liar

Author: Nicholas Terry

Misrepresentation is one of the favourite tactics of 'revisionist' authors, yet it's also a technique that is easily countered by simply checking up the sources 'cited' by the denier author in question. So why do they persist in doing it? Perhaps because none of their audience will ever bother to check the originals, especially if the sources cited are from mainstream historians.

In the course of researching revisionist arguments about other things, I came across the following from Jürgen Graf's erstwhile 'demolition' of Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of European Jewry, Giant with Feet of Clay (pp.63-4, large PDF):

In Stanislawow [a town in Galicia], about 10,000 Jews had been gathered at a cemetery and shot on October 12, 1941. Another shooting took place in March 1942, followed by a ghetto fire lasting for three weeks. A transport was sent to Belzec in April, and more shooting operations were launched in the summer, in the course of which Jewish council members and Order Service men were hanged from lampposts. Large transports moved out to Belzec in September and October [...].

Let us leave to one side the transports to Belzec, the shooting in March 1942 and the Jews 'hanged from lampposts', and content ourselves [p.64] with the first item of 'information' here, the shooting of not less than 10,000 Jews in the cemetery in Stanislavov on 12th October 1941. This number corresponds to the population of a small town. What evidence does Hilberg support himself with, what sources does he name as proof for the ten thousandfold murder in the cemetery? Simply and utterly none,not even a witness statement. In other words: The story is a pure chimera.

So I turn to page 521 of the 1991 German edition of Hilberg (the one first cited by Graf) and find footnote 357 at the end of the paragraph quoted above:

Graf falsely claimed Hilberg cited no evidence, which was untrue. The quality of the evidence was not impeached, instead Graf opted to omit the contents of the footnote on the same page and claim no evidence was advanced. Therefore, Graf is an outright liar.

For Tuvia Friedman's original collection, click here [Wayback Machine copy]. For an extensive summary of the evidence accumulated by 1998, i.e. 37 years after Hilberg's first edition and 7 years after the German edition, click here (PDF) for a succinct article by Dieter Pohl, the leading specialist on the Holocaust in Galicia. In actual fact, not only are there eyewitnesses coming out of historians' ears, there are also documents.

One suspects that this exercise could be repeated endlessly with 'revisionist scholarship', but for the moment, let this single case stand as an example of the utter mendacity of 'revisionists'.

The liar here is Nick Terry, because he commits the Lie of Omitting.The text of Hilberg states nothing about any proof and speaks of 3 different events (in October '41, March '42 and April '42). About this so called 'witness' Mund, he: "...had HEARD (from the second or eighth hand?) that a long row of jews were forced to crowl on their knees to the station." For nothing else does Hilberg here give any 'evidence', except for his own unreliability (Or do you seriously mean that real proof for this came in 1957 from the 'collection'(?) of a certain Friedmann from (of all places) Haifa? Me surely not.)

This is a perfect example of the 'quality' of 'proof' this imposter and exaggerator Hilberg used to produce.And of a liar, that (as usual) only wants to throw mud on one of his scientific and intellectual superiors.